Alma College Cultural Landscape Rehabilitation
Location: Los Gatos
Size: 20 acres
Partners: Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District
PGAdesign assessed the landscape of the historic former Alma College property, and subsequently led an expansive team of subconsultants in preparing a rehabilitation plan that tells the site’s story through the cultural landscape. Unique site, geotechnical, and architectural issues—including the presence of the San Andreas fault—inform the plan.
The site has broad significance: this cultural landscape parallels the story of development in California. Used by Indigenous cultures for millennia, loggers with sawmills came to the site in the mid-nineteenth century, followed by early 20th-century industrialists who established their rural estates there. The Jesuits arrived in the 1930s, establishing the West Coast’s first Jesuit college, Alma College. After the college relocated in 1969, the site was briefly a school but has remained essentially unused until the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District acquired it as part of the 1,400-acre Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve.
PGAdesign’s plan carefully protects and interprets these layers while integrating natural resource stewardship and recognition to the site’s new primary function as an open space preserve. The Bear Creek Redwoods Preserve opened to the public in 2017, and the Alma College site opened in 2022.
Awards
California Preservation Foundation Award, 2023
Location: Los Gatos
Project Type:
Education
Historic
Parks + Recreation
Size: 20 acres
PGAdesign assessed the landscape of the historic former Alma College property, and subsequently led an expansive team of subconsultants in preparing a rehabilitation plan that tells the site’s story through the cultural landscape. Unique site, geotechnical, and architectural issues—including the presence of the San Andreas fault—inform the plan.
The site has broad significance: this cultural landscape parallels the story of development in California. Used by Indigenous cultures for millennia, loggers with sawmills came to the site in the mid-nineteenth century, followed by early 20th-century industrialists who established their rural estates there. The Jesuits arrived in the 1930s, establishing the West Coast’s first Jesuit college, Alma College. After the college relocated in 1969, the site was briefly a school but has remained essentially unused until the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District acquired it as part of the 1,400-acre Bear Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve.
PGAdesign’s plan carefully protects and interprets these layers while integrating natural resource stewardship and recognition to the site’s new primary function as an open space preserve. The Bear Creek Redwoods Preserve opened to the public in 2017, and the Alma College site opened in 2022.
Awards
California Preservation Foundation Award, 2023
